Did you ever notice as you get older that you are turning into your parent? Surprising things come out of your mouth that only they would have said?
Even if the mirror doesn’t reflect it, I am turning into my dad. Genes and DNA account for some of it. I have his short body build as opposed to my mom’s long-legged slenderness. A weak groin is an inherited trait, and I find myself facing my second hernia surgery, not as many as my dad had, but in the same groin area.
My dad had a knack for seeing the funny side of life, and could turn almost any situation into a one-liner. Dad never went farther than the fourth grade in school. His authoritarian German immigrant father made all of his sons work on the farm as soon as they could lift a rock. But Dad loved to read. He educated himself through his reading and he also had a gift for mechanics. To diagnose a mechanical problem, he would hop in the car with the owner and they would take it for a spin. Every jolt, clunk, rattle or wheeze meant something to my dad, and he would determine how to get old Betsy back on the road. “Leak in the carburetor,” he’d announce with the authority of a brain surgeon.
He built his own business, starting as an employee and ending up as owner of a combination service station and repair garage, with my mom at his side handling the business side of it. At the intersection of North Dakota Highways 15 and 52, the Schimke Service Station gained a reputation as a good place to do business.
When farmers and townspeople came in with ailing autos, they’d often hang around and watch my dad work, not because they were concerned about the car repair, but because they said, “Pete always makes me laugh.”
I think that the winding microscopic strands of DNA have one section called HAHA and I was lucky enough to inherit that from my dad. I became a primary teacher, and those little kids and I laughed all day long. They were so cute and funny, I still laugh out loud when I remember some of what they said and did. After retiring and becoming a writer, my favorite genre is humor writing.
My dad passed on more to me than physical traits and a sunny outlook. I remember a moment when a short serious conversation influenced me for the rest of my life and set the course for the person I would become.
I was nine years old. We were in the lobby section of the service station where you could buy anything from a 25-cent pack of Camels, a package of Sen-sen breath freshener, to a fan belt for your car.
Dad stood by the red Coke-cooler and I pranced around, talking. Jack Hanson, who worked for the city repairing streets, had just left in his big orange truck.
At nine years old, I was a smarty-pants. I got straight A’s in school. My name was always on the Honor Roll printed regularly in The Wells County Free Press. Teachers loved me and said I was smart. I knew I was—I read books far above my grade level. I was typing poems and stories on the L.C. Smith typewriter that my mom had in the office.
“That Jack Hanson is so dumb,” I told my Dad. “Did you hear what he said about . . . and I named something that had passed in conversation. Jack Hanson was what was called in those days “Slow.” It wasn’t as bad as being labeled “Feeble-minded” but in that category.
I continued to dance around laughing at how dumb Jack Hanson was. But my dad, who always appreciated anything funny, wasn’t laughing.
He remained quiet. I stopped dancing and finally when he had my full attention, he spoke.
“Lucille,” he said. “I want to ask you something.”
I stood still and bit on my fingernail. I was listening.
“You know that big pothole in the highway that Jack Hanson fixed last week?”
I nodded. I remembered. It was just past our station. Cars either swung around to miss it, or banged and bumped their way through it.
“Do you think you could have fixed it?”
I thought of the smell of the hot tar, and the asphalt falling in a pile from the upraised bed of the dump truck, and after that the smoothing out of that rocky pile so that the surface blended in with the road, letting cars cruise smoothly along. I knew I couldn’t have done any part of it in a hundred years.
That was it. My dad went back to the shop. He didn’t have to say any more. What I heard in the tone of his voice and the expression on his face said it all. “You never make fun of anyone or look down on anyone. Every person you will ever meet knows something you don’t know. Every person is just as smart as you are.”
I found that to be true from that moment on. I have lived for many decades now and I’ve met a lot of people. Every single one of them, including my little first graders, who’d only been around for six years, had something to teach me. The wisdom my dad gave me standing by the Coke cooler that warm Dakota day was an even greater gift than the HAHA gene.
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Lucy Bell, former writing consultant and published author, is inspired by James Baldwin who said: One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. Lucy mines her own experiences with a preference for the humorous. She is currently working on a collection of essays titled “Most of It Was Fun.”
